Maybe it’s not a great song. (Or even a good one.) But the video’s got perhaps the best unrecognized camp line in movie-promotion music video history: “Flash, I love you — but we’ve only got 14 hours to save the Earth!” It’s got that, plus blow-dried hair and reflective clothing. 1980, where did you go?

The nuts my daughter will crack but not eat.

The cookies she baked with my sister that I said look like chipmunk scat.

The spatula that fell onto the heating element in the dish washer.

The dog who needs a walk every night and gets it.

The cigar from that walk.

The glass of orange juice from our tree that I drank while posting this.

The current issue of Details carries a profile of the aging and unapologetic Pee-wee Herman. (Am I still pissed? You bet.)

(By the way, no, I don’t subscribe to Details. But I now seem to be getting it free in the mail. Hey, if they’re going to offer all the content for free on the web, why not print it and mail it for free, too? Which makes me wonder if the Pennysaver giveaways didn’t have the right idea all along.)

Back to Pee-wee:  When I finally finally was able to get through to Ticketmaster about the ticket “exchange,” I found that my order had been “canceled,” but now I had the delicious opportunity to order worse seats for far more money. The humidity in Burbank that day came from all the steam pouring out of my ears. And then, to add insult to injury, as though the bait and switch weren’t bad enough, the refund didn’t come until two weeks after promised, meaning they banked my money the entire time and took a float on it.

Yes, Pee-wee and his management team and everyone else involved will be getting a letter from the state department of consumer affairs as soon as I file a case.

I’m going back to mourning Soupy Sales now.

Last night for about the 10th year in a row, my friend and I went to Knott’s Scary Farm. Want to know what was truly scary? How few people were there. In past years, the event has been sold out and you ran the risk of being turned away if you didn’t buy in advance or scalping tickets. This year? The Vampire Lestat would have starved to death looking for warm bodies. The effects of the recession (and increased competition from Universal Studios’ offering) was spooky.

Here I am outside Uncle Bobo’s Big Top of the Bizarre.

And here’s one of Uncle Bobo’s evil clowns making sure he’s on the schedule. I don’t blame him. All across the land, 1 out of 8 evil clowns is out of work.

If you’ve ever tried to find a good business application for the iPhone using the App Store, you’re no doubted tempted to say, “There’s some crApp for that.” Whoever said that every library should post a sign warning users about all the bad advice that could be found within would have a field day with the range of apps for the iPhone.

But now we have this: The no-junk business iPhone apps finder.

Some people in Maine are campaigning against equal rights for gays and lesbians.

Let’s hear what an 86-year-old World War II vet and lifelong Republican who fought on Omaha Beach has to say about equal rights.

Why do I work in the theatre? Yes, I love the thrum of immediate, live, audience response. But tonight, again, I wondered if maybe it isn’t the actors who keep me coming back. The good, competent, skilled, professional, incredibly talented actors who are fun to work with because they have incredible passion for what they do and because they can channel up human expression and the depths of our experience and present it to us in ways that are eerily true and unexpected.

Case in point:  this guy, my friend Brian Newkirk.

A little background:

I have known and worked with Brian Newkirk for about 12 years. I don’t know how many plays we’ve done together now with me serving as director or producer, and he may have been in one or two of the plays I’ve written as well and I’ve honestly forgotten, and if so, I apologize, but it just seems that we’ve done countless projects together. For all 12 years, Brian has been the consummate pro. I know that people who don’t work with actors all the time have this stereotype that actors are flakes. Neurotic, drooling, pampered, skittish, impossible flakes. No — those are stars (and just some of them). Actors — real actors — do things like show up on time, and know their lines, and give their all, and will do anything for a good part, and ask for little in return except maybe that you respect their craft. Sometimes you get a person who is both actor and star; I did three gigs with Alfred Molina, and I can tell you, he is a star and an actor. There are plenty of other examples, too. But to do theatre, you’d better be an actor. There’s no one there to bail you out, and there’s nobody who’s going to yell, “Cut,” and there’s no fixing your performance in post.

Which brings me back to Brian Newkirk. During the rehearsal of “The Incident Report,” a world-premiere play by EM Lewis that I’m directing, one of my actors took ill. Throughout the weeks of rehearsal, he kept going to doctors and hospitals and labs and getting every test known to man — and still made it to rehearsals and even made it to opening night before, finally, two days ago, he was hospitalized with, wait for it, a heart infection. Yes, an infection in his heart. And he still came to opening night and blew me and everybody else away, before he finally got diagnosed with something so serious that there are miles of tubes and other artificial plumbing now running in and out of his chest in a hospital at UCLA. So, Monday, two nights before the next performance, enter Brian Newkirk, who nobly agreed to go on in this other actor’s stead. How many rehearsals did Brian get with me? None — unless you count the “rehearsal” we did today over the phone.  Yes, I have now done everything one can do as a stage director on behalf of “the show must go on,” because I have now rehearsed an understudy over the phone. And by “rehearsed,” I mean we discussed his character arc and his intentions and an approach to the character, in about 15 minutes. And tonight, two days after getting tapped to go on for the rest of this run, and with one linethrough with his fellow actors yesterday and 15 minutes on the phone with me today, Brian Newkirk went on tonight. No script in hand, all of his lines and his blocking committed to memory. And he was fantastic.

I love this story. Don’t  you love this story? Because don’t we all like to believe that if you just put your back into it and your heart and soul, you can do amazing things?

I knew I’d forgotten to mention two other critters encountered on our trip.

Because we were in the high desert, it figured that this guy would run across our path (which he did).

And while we didn’t see his arch-nemesis, his constant yammering at night certainly kept my dog entertained.

Just in time for Halloween:  truly repulsive candy.

(Thanks to Rich Roesberg for making me aware of this. And no, my kids won’t be on his doorstep this Halloween.)

Sorry for the absence; I took my family camping in the mountains for three days and didn’t want all those burglars who read this blog to know we would be out of town. I don’t know how many of them there are out there, but I figured I wouldn’t take my chances, given the media coverage of all the zillions of people who supposedly blogged about forthcoming vacations and then returned to find they’d been cleaned out better than a pop-up Halloween store on November 1st.  Normally, we have a trusted house sitter who guards the house while our dog guards him, but we wanted to take the dog with us and also give the trusted house sitter and friend a break.

We stayed in the Cleveland National Forest, which is not in Cleveland, but in San Diego County. The weather was ideal —  warm and dry — and the site rather secluded and peaceful because late October is off-season. The last time I went camping, four years ago, I took my elder son to Lone Pine, elevation 10,000 feet, where it was cold in July. This time the top of the mountain was a mere 5,000 feet, and 72 degrees in October. We saw many representatives of wildlife, not one of which I was able to capture a photo of. Luckily, I have artists’ representations:

The latter two were a constant presence, in alternating shifts. The first night sleeping out in the tent I was enchanted by the hooting of the local owl (wherever he was); the second night I was aching for an air rifle and a clear shot at him. The second fellow above was highly industrious and completely absorbed in his work of pounding acorns into his winter pantry all day long with  his head. Here’s an example of his handicraft:

Two animals that, in three days, we did not see:

A cow. For some reasons, there are signs heading almost the entire way up the mountain warning of cows — or, perhaps, a single cow, one lone maddened reckless bloodthirsty cow who terrorizes the mountain. We never saw it, although my 7-year-old son was insistent that he had seen both a cow and, at one point, a ram. (He also spent much of the weekend conversing in the tongue of Jar-Jar Binks, so his word is meaningless.)

And then, on the way down the mountain and home, we saw this sign. (And no sign of the animals referenced here either.)